by Puk Damsgård
When the van stopped, he was led into a room with a toilet. A chain was hung around his neck and chest and he was locked to a sink. He enjoyed his solitude away from the busy foyer, where he had felt he was constantly being watched. In the following four days he drank foul-smelling but vital water from the toilet bowl. No water came out of the tap.
The pain from the handcuffs permeated his sleep. In his dreams he lived in a cycle of failed escape attempts. He ran into things, couldn’t get up, fell down; people lied and laughed and wouldn’t remove his handcuffs as they had promised.
He woke up in pain and shifted his position from right to left without finding relief.
It was around 10 June when a prison guard came to move him again. His next destination was to be the basement of the torture centre where some other western hostages were already being held captive.
The Hostages under the Children’s Hospital
Daniel was standing in front of a mirror that hung on the wall in the toilet of his new prison. The handcuffs and the blindfold had finally been removed and he had been given some clean clothes. He was looking at himself for the first time since he had been kidnapped twenty-four days earlier.
The skin around his eyes was not just blue, thought Daniel, but black as the night. There were marks that hung like a chain of oblong, grey beads around his neck, testifying to his suicide attempt. He leaned over the sink towards the mirror and looked himself deep in the eyes. There was no life in them. His cheeks were white and sunken. It was like looking at a dead man. He realized that the water he’d been given in the last few days might have actually saved his life.
Because of the blindfold, he hadn’t seen his hands since he had been caught in the cornfield and had smoked a cigarette in the banqueting hall with the boys in the Arsenal jerseys. They had swollen to twice their normal size, as if he were wearing ski gloves. When he went to wash the wounds on his wrists, he understood why the pain was so excruciating. Through a bracelet of reddish-brown gunk in the wound, he could see his bones and tendons. He tried to clean the wounds and washed the smears of blood and dirt off his body, which stank of stale sweat and fear. Then he put on the clean blue underpants and the camouflage uniform that the guards had given him.
Daniel was led into a large basement room. A heavy black metal door separated him from the corridor. The whitewashed walls of the cellar were made of concrete and the only sunlight that reached down into the room came through a small window in the toilet. Clinical white tiles covered the floor.
Daniel was able to walk freely around the room without a blindfold or handcuffs, and he had been given a blanket and a water bottle. He was fed a couple of times a day. He tried to get body and soul together again. He’d had ongoing gastrointestinal distress, which was made no better by the new, luxurious surroundings, even though he could now clip his nails and keep himself reasonably clean.
· * ·
It was the torturer Abu Hurraya who had delivered Daniel to the basement of the building, which was known as the children’s hospital in Aleppo.
The hospital had served as the unofficial prison of various rebel factions since the war had begun. The rebels were fighting among themselves for control of the area and there were periods when several factions shared the hospital buildings between them, so prisoners of Jabhat al-Nusra were in one wing, while ISIS prisoners were held in the other.
The prison was at that time under the daily leadership of the ISIS head of security in Aleppo, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Ubaidah al-Maghribi. The surname al-Maghribi indicated Moroccan ancestry, but he was by all accounts a citizen of the Netherlands. In a picture that was taken of him before he went to Syria, his almost feminine features are remarkable: a narrow face with a beauty mark on his left cheek and curved, full lips; round, dark, smiling eyes under bushy eyebrows; clean shaven with short hair, slim and tall.
Once in Syria, he had let his beard grow, but it was thin and barely covered his chin and cheeks. He never shouted and spoke in a friendly manner in several languages, including Dutch, French, English, German and Arabic.
According to several sources, Abu Ubaidah had studied computer engineering at the University of Amsterdam and now held a senior position in the ISIS organization. He had apparently married and had a child in Syria, all while holding prisoners in the basement of the children’s hospital.
· * ·
‘Psssst, Daniel … Daniel …’
He woke up and looked straight at two western-looking men. One of them had short grey hair, while the other had longish, tousled brown hair.
They looked at him with concern in their eyes and introduced themselves as the French journalist Didier François and freelance photographer Edouard Elias. Didier was in his early fifties and an experienced correspondent, while Edouard was in his mid-twenties like Daniel. The Frenchmen already knew his name. They had heard Daniel screaming while someone had been shouting his name.
‘We could hear that they were treating you very badly,’ Didier remarked. Didier and Edouard had been kidnapped only four days ago and had no visible bruises.
Daniel felt a paradoxical relief that he was no longer the only westerner. The presence of the Frenchmen could be his chance of survival, since the more foreigners there were the more focus there would be on finding them, he thought. And he had been longing for human contact with someone who spoke English.
‘I was captured three weeks ago,’ said Daniel and he told them briefly about what his torturers had done to him.
The sight of Didier and Edouard brought home to him again how dehydrated, emaciated and bruised he was. He had been reduced to a defenceless, dirty animal and he sensed that his wretched physical and mental condition was disheartening to the newcomers. The Frenchmen didn’t say much, as if Daniel were the symbol of what could happen to them. He could well understand their reaction.
When Didier asked him for advice on how to stay active while they were locked up, the mood softened a little and Daniel showed them a couple of abdominal and back bends that they could do to keep their bodies in shape.
After a few days they were all moved to a small boiler room further down the corridor. Two cisterns filled most of the room, but they were allowed to take their blankets with them and they were fed at noon and 6 p.m. Daniel was struggling with the open wounds on both his wrists and with his violent diarrhoea, which he had to control somehow, because there was no toilet in the boiler room.
When the prison guards knocked on the door and shouted hamam, the prisoners got to their feet and put on their blindfolds. They grabbed a water bottle with one hand and held on to each other’s shoulder to walk single file to the toilet. When they got there, Daniel hurried to use the toilet and fill his water bottle while the guards pounded aggressively on the door.
After only a few days in the cistern room, they were moved back to the large basement room. Daniel became increasingly ill and couldn’t keep anything down. He was lying on the floor and could feel pain all over his body, when a prison guard came in.
‘Do you think we can get a million dollars for you?’ he asked.
Daniel momentarily forgot his discomfort. The question was the first indication that the kidnapping could be about money and that he wouldn’t be sitting in this basement for ever. He remembered that his insurance would pay only five million kroner (about £530,000), but that was secondary right now.
‘I don’t know, but maybe,’ was his response. Daniel had been given a glimmer of hope to cling to.
The three western prisoners were soon separated from each other. Edouard was to remain in the basement room, while Didier and Daniel were moved to a smaller cell. There were already a couple of Syrian prisoners in the small cell, and this one didn’t even have a toilet.
For Daniel, the following days were a living hell.
He was terrified of what the guards might think of doing to him if they had to con
stantly take him to the toilet because of his diarrhoea. He didn’t dare knock on the door and ask permission to go. Suddenly he noticed faeces leaking out through his trousers and down on to the blanket. He tried to act like it was nothing, but when one of the Syrian prisoners smelled Daniel’s diarrhoea, he immediately hammered on the door and shouted to the guards that he didn’t want to sit in that stench.
The guards hustled Daniel out to the toilet, where he was ordered to wash himself and put on a clean pair of trousers. Then they put a large, empty yoghurt container into the cell, which Daniel was supposed to use as a toilet. But the bucket wasn’t deep enough and his faeces splattered out over the wall.
The other prisoners were irritated and so were the guards. When one of them, a short, fat man, discovered faeces on the wall, he went berserk and hit Daniel on the head and shoulders with a stick.
He then took Daniel to the bathroom, where he drew his pistol and pointed it threateningly at Daniel’s face.
‘You have to pull yourself together,’ said Didier to Daniel afterwards, with reference to the fact that the smellier and the more frightened and submissive he became, the more he was reducing himself to an animal that the guards thought they had the right to beat.
He was so weakened by the beatings and the diarrhoea that he often fainted when he stood up and he didn’t have the strength to eat. Didier hid flat bread for him under the blanket and asked for diarrhoea pills.
But it was the wounds on his wrists that most worried Daniel. He was terrified that they would become infected, that he would get gangrene and die. The bracelet of pus and fluid hardened, fell off, and became slimy again. He tried to protect his wrists from the hairy blanket he was lying on by placing a piece of fabric between it and his hands. When he finally dragged his body to the toilet, he held back from washing afterwards for fear of germs and just shook himself dry.
The fat little man often came to visit, sometimes with food and a young boy – whom he was clearly looking after and who could be heard shouting nonsense out in the corridor – and at other times just to amuse himself by humiliating Daniel.
‘Make a noise like a dog!’ shouted the fat man, who laughed loudly when Daniel barked.
‘Make a noise like a donkey!’
Daniel didn’t dare disobey.
‘When I say “Daniel”, you say “jahass”,’ came the order.
‘Say it as if you are sad,’ he continued and Daniel said ‘jahass’ in fifteen different ways.
‘As long as they don’t beat me again,’ he thought as he went through all the sounds of the animal kingdom.
He had become a dog himself, one that did what it was told, and lay down on his back with his legs over his head. He was afraid of shitting in his trousers in front of the little fat man.
There wasn’t any peace at night, either. Daniel lay listening to prisoners being dragged out of other basement rooms and beaten. The screams and blows of the whip reached into the cell, where he counted them to shut out his anxiety. Counting helped. The victims howled and whimpered, sometimes for maybe fifteen minutes, other times for several hours. The torture made Daniel sleepless and paranoid.
On 20 June, after more than a month in captivity, a guard came to fetch him and told him to follow. Daniel crossed the hallway and was led into the guards’ room. It was a long room with a television and a table at one end, where two guards were sitting. One of them was a burly man with a long beard, who stood ready with a camera on a tripod. The burly man told him to sit on a chair by the wall. Daniel was going to appear in a video.
‘It’s to your government,’ he was informed.
Daniel sat in a camouflage jacket and tried to look at the camera, even though it was too far away for him to see it properly without his glasses.
‘Pull your sleeves down over your wrists,’ said the cameraman, adding, ‘and hold them down between your knees.’
Following instructions, Daniel said who he was and that he wouldn’t be released unless the Danish government paid a ransom. ‘Please pay so I can come home,’ begged Daniel, followed by greetings to his family: ‘I’m well. I miss you. I love you, Mum and Dad. I love you, Signe.’
Then they turned off the camera.
‘Thank you,’ said Daniel, relieved that a video message would finally be sent to Denmark.
‘You should thank yourself,’ said the burly man, blindfolding him and taking him back to the cell.
· * ·
More than a month had gone by since Daniel disappeared. It became a permanent part of Susanne’s morning routine to follow the news about Syria and write in her diary.
She also developed habits she had never had previously. Every evening she said a prayer, asking God to take care of Daniel, no matter where he was or what he had done. In the bedroom she had placed two wrought-iron hearts containing strings of lights, which she lit every evening at dusk. She also began taking the time to chase flies out of the window to freedom instead of smashing them with a fly-swatter as she usually did.
Susanne and Kjeld were both spending a lot of time on the phone. In the space of a few weeks a previously unknown man had become the most important person in their lives. Arthur was their lifeline to Daniel and he called them frequently from Turkey with new information.
‘Daniel has probably been brought before a sharia court in Aleppo,’ he reported in a loud voice. ‘It’s being said that he has been accused of having brought pornographic images.’
Arthur explained that, within his network of informants, rumours had flourished at first that Daniel had been sentenced to death and that the sentence had already been executed. Shortly afterwards it was reported that he was alive and could escape sentencing if the family paid a sum for his offences. Arthur suggested that, with his help, Susanne and Kjeld should write a letter to the sharia court to influence the judges to release Daniel on payment of a fine. It was still unclear whether the information had come from influential sources in the hierarchy around Daniel, yet Arthur sent word to his network that he wanted to get proof that Daniel was still alive and to start negotiations. The hope was that this message would also confirm that Daniel had been detained in Aleppo as alleged.
An amount of approximately $700,000 had been mentioned by Abu Suheib, according to an intermediary. This was money that would have to be paid by Daniel’s family, because Denmark doesn’t pay ransoms to kidnappers. The political parties in parliament had rarely been more steadfastly in agreement than they were on this issue. They didn’t want to incite terrorist organizations and other criminals to take more Danish hostages. Denmark thus belonged to the group of countries that was trying to curtail the hostage industry by slamming shut the cash box. The State didn’t want to become involved in what the ministries behind closed doors had dubbed the ‘Daniel affair’, either by paying a ransom or any other costs associated with the search for him.
On the other hand, the Foreign Ministry was willing to play a liaison role and made rooms available for meetings between various actors in the case. It was also incumbent on the Ministry’s Citizens Advice Bureau to provide information to Susanne and Kjeld, who, along with Anita, regularly attended meetings at the Ministry concerning Denmark’s position on the case and the latest news about Daniel, although very often they had already received this information from Arthur.
There was no doubt that the network that had taken Daniel was just as ideological as it was money-grubbing. The hierarchy among the suspected kidnappers slowly became clearer to Arthur and it led straight to the top of the ISIS leadership. At the bottom of the hierarchy sat the Iraqi ISIS leader in Azaz, Abu Suheib, who was most likely the one behind Daniel’s kidnapping in the first place. Further up was the head of the prison in Aleppo, the Dutchman Abu Ubaidah. Operationally, they shared the same boss, Abu Athir, who was the Emir of Aleppo and was at the top of the hierarchy as a member of the Shura Council under Baghdadi.
All lines of command led to Abu Athir and Arthur learned from his network that it was he who decided whether hostages should live, die or be brought before a sharia court.
The family couldn’t take the risk of not trying to raise the $700,000 that might bring Daniel home. Kjeld contacted the family’s banker and on 20 June Susanne overcame her misgivings. She and Kjeld signed for a loan of 3.7 million kroner, guaranteed by Daniel’s insurance. Susanne dropped off the signed loan documents at their local bank branch before going to work at Legoland, where she earned $23 an hour.
She told herself that the staggering amount they had borrowed was just a number on a piece of paper.
· * ·
No one ever saw the video in which Daniel appealed to the government to pay a ransom, because it was never sent to Denmark.
Daniel, who was unaware of this, survived on the slim hope that the appeal would help to get him out. In the meantime, he had been moved back into the large basement room, without Didier. The cell was now full of Syrian prisoners, who had placed their blankets as far from the toilet as possible. The atmosphere in the room was sultry and stagnant and the only fresh air that occasionally reached them came from the small toilet window.
Daniel lay between a thin man, Bashir, who was in his fifties, and his stout friend Mohammad, who had sixteen children; there were a lot of medicine bottles by his blanket, because he suffered from diabetes. They welcomed Daniel and let him eat more than them.
In the morning the Syrian prisoners got up early to pray, while Daniel usually slept until the first meal, around midday. He tried to establish daily routines to regain his strength. He felt weak when he tried to walk around in the cell, but reminded himself that if he got some exercise his body would begin to absorb nutrients rather than expel them. He counted eighteen steps back and forth across the cell floor.